


Tulips

by hongmunmu



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen, Healing, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 09:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8618269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hongmunmu/pseuds/hongmunmu
Summary: Sometimes things can grow through the filth.





	

 She’s bent down over a cracked tile in the centre of the hall when he stumbles down the stairs, hungover and wrecked, heavy bags deep under his eyes, clutching to the banister like a lifeline. It’s only as he draws close that she sits back on her heels, revealing her prize.

   “ Tulips, ” he says, stating the obvious. Orana smiles. 

“ Yes. ”

* * *

   She cares for that tiny sprig of flowers like they’re her own children. She prunes the weeds, cuts out the poisonous fungi, gives them water. Sunlight shines in from the many holes in the collapsing roof, and she stands in the patch of warmth with them, her and her tiny tulips. They’re beautiful, violet and indigo and forget-me-not blue. One small thing of loveliness in that wrecked ruin of a house. Fenris watched her from the shadows sometimes, perched in a hollow of the wall on his days off, observing as she scurried to and fro, dusting, watering, tending. Letting life wax and wane from her fingers. 

  They inspired her. Something so small and strong growing out of nothing, growing through the cracks. A glimmer of hope for someone like her. For someone like him. She told him once or twice. He never commented on it, but some nights when she slept, he would, inebriated and wallowing in his pain, curl up by those flowers til the morning and watched their buds open up to the sunlight. Orana found him sometimes, asleep in a patch of sunlight like a cat, next to those precious, fragile, violet blooms. 

   In the months to come Orana heads to the market often, and she spends the money Fenris pays her on seeds, and seeds, and seeds. She puts them in all the cracks, every hole and crevice of that decrepit house, planting them like wishes. The violet bleeds life into the mansion, shining out of every corner, and though they don’t say it, it wears on them in private smiles, small surges of emotion in their hearts when they think the other isn’t looking. 


End file.
